Vinyl vs Streaming

I tried streaming again and it can sound very good on its own. And I’m sure one can find pristine hi-res tracks / albums in isolation that fare very well against the vinyl copy. But across most material, I still find streaming to fare poorly against CD, and CD to fare poorly against vinyl. The gap to vinyl is still quite large IMO. I was particularly disappointed to not be able to replace my CD player - and the obnoxious tedium of burning of CDs from FLACs - at this time. 

Not too long ago, a good friend with more experience in digital/streamers told me "you'll need to spend at least $5K to get a streamer you won't absolute HATE". He turned out to be right, maybe even a little optimistic there.

Some folks still prefer horse and buggies. There is something to be said about that.  
 

Just saying…..

Like wire..a topic beaten to death, one the other or both It’s personal choice. That said vinyl, R&R, Cassettes, CD, will never be dominant again Technology moves up and on end of the story….lol 

@mulveling Says it best if you ask me. 

As to digital and streaming ever being the equal to quality analog recording, maybe it will at some point or maybe it has in some instances. In my own system, the closest that I have found to vinyl or tape, is HDCD. There are other hi rez digital formats, SACD, DVDA and others but with the gear that I have, it's been HDCD. I wish I could find more of them.

If you compare audio to photography............bear with me here. There was a point in time when digital resolution or photo quality overtook the 35mm film camera. I asked someone in a camera store when that occurred and they said it was when digital cameras got up to about 7 megapixels. I think cell phone cameras are now up to over 30 megapixels in some cases. Kind of crazy. I had a very nice SLR digital camera from Nikon and I stopped using it out of the convenience and quality of cell phone cameras. I sold one Nikon and gave one away. 

If there is a digital/analog equivalent to the photography analogy in music or sound reproduction, I'd like to know what it is. It seems plausible that there would be a similar story but I do not know at what resolution or bit rate, this revolution would occur. Maybe we have a recording engineer out there who can answer this? 

This is a tired topic. I use Qobuz for streaming and the biggest problem I have with it is that it’s often limited to "re-mastered" files, which are almost without exception the compressed, dynamically limited versions. So of course they tend to sound not as good as an original LP or early CD.